Performance and flexibility have historically been viewed as opposing goals in network system design. The emergence of Packet Handling software in networking has pushed the struggle to achieve both performance and flexibility in the same system to the forefront of the requirements of next-generation networking. The fundamental building blocks of network application designs are Packet Processing and Control. Conventional ASIC-based designs combine Packet Processing and Control into custom hardware, achieving performance at the expense of flexibility, development cost and complexity. At the other end of the conventional design spectrum lie “server”-based approaches, which place Packet Processing and Control on general purpose processors, thereby retaining flexibility at the expense of performance.
Application Ser. Nos. 09/679,321 and 09/918,363, incorporated by reference herein, advanced the state of the art by providing a Programmable Network Server and Device. An aspect of these applications is that they provided a platform for performing Packet Processing and Control applications that is dynamically and remotely loadable such that new network service applications can be written and deployed on servers without deploying network personnel to the server location and without interrupting or re-routing traffic that would otherwise pass through the device.
The present application aims at extending and leveraging certain of the capabilities of the co-pending applications in new and useful ways.